Riding Mountain: the undiscovered country

Manitoba national park a shining jewel in the rough

A small group of us who have signed on for a nature tour with Earth Rhythms in Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park stand at the edge of a sedge meadow at a far too early hour, wishing we had brought warmer clothes.

It's mid-September, but tentative snowflakes are drifting down and the temperature is hovering around 0 C. Never mind, it's elk rutting season, and if we're lucky, we'll witness an elk passion play that will provide dinner-party conversation for a few moons.

According to our guide, Celes Davar, who was once a Riding Mountain forest ranger, this meadow was created by beavers that once had a pond here and then vamoosed. Sedge is the first thing that comes back after beaver ponds dry up, and elk absolutely crave sedge. By this point in the tour, we no longer question anything Davar says -- he is all-wise and all-knowing.

Davar is the head honcho and founder of Earth Rhythms, an ecotourism company that provides learning and craft experiences for small groups that want to experience nature and culture in this part of Manitoba. The company has a battery of community partners -- artists, beekeepers, naturalists, musicians, chefs, aboriginal teachers, cattle ranchers and research scientists -- who all add their insights into the traditions and ecology of the area.

Ask someone (even a Manitoban) about 3,000-square-kilometre Riding National Park and you may get a blank stare. (Actually, you may get a blank stare if you ask about Manitoba, a place that writer Bartley Kives in A Daytripper's Guide to Manitoba calls "undervisited, underappreciated and undiscovered.") Manitoba, in the minds of most Canadians, he says, is a vast wheat field populated by parka-wearing bumpkins with a fondness for snowmobiles and ice-fishing.

The purpose of his book, he says, is to shed a little light on this jewel in the rough. The Parkland area that I came to explore is a huge triangle-shaped chunk of western Manitoba that takes its name from the two largest natural areas in Manitoba -- Riding Mountain National Park and Duck Mountain Provincial Park. Riding is the only road-accessible national park in Manitoba and it contains a wealth of wildlife, the province's largest network of cross-country ski trails, hiking, mountain biking, fishing, horseback riding and much more.

On the way to breakfast at Lake Audy, we drive through the park's captive bison range in the wildest part of the park. Here, about three dozen bison of all ages graze nonchalantly in their three-square-kilometre enclosure as we hang out of our van snapping up shots from every angle. The beasts are so uninterested in our human presence that they graze scant feet away and wander across the road. Davar cautions us to stay in the car because, as docile as they seem, bison can be aggressive and they can sprint up to 50 kilometres per hour.

Whatever we are expecting, breakfast in a covered shelter is a surprise. One of Earth Rhythms' "partners" is Elkhorn Resort (where we happen to be staying in cosy cottages) and the resort has laid on a chef, portable cooking facilities and a breakfast to bring tears to our eyes: elk sausages, toad-in-the-hole, platters of fresh fruit and freshly squeezed orange juice and muffins made from seasonal berries. All of this on white tablecloths with real cutlery and dinnerware. It's like a luxury safari.

Next on the agenda is an intro to geocaching, one of the fastest growing new adventure games in the world, thanks to the Internet and global positioning systems. This new passion was made possible when former U.S. president Bill Clinton removed the "selected availability" classification (a scramble code) from 24 satellites around the globe and improved the accuracy of GPS technology tenfold. With this move, anyone could precisely pinpoint his location or the location of objects to within two metres, anywhere in the world.

Geocaching, in a nutshell, is a high-tech treasure hunt that allows anyone with access to a computer and a low-cost GPS unit to take part in searches for "caches," clues for which are left on a website (www.geocaching.com). Davar divides my group into two, gives us a crash course in using the units, explains what "waypoints" are and then hands out navigation sheets for The Golden Geocache hidden somewhere in the park.

One of the park's big attractions is a network of biking and hiking trails, some of which we try out the following morning. During one, Davar puts us in the hooves of elk and tells us we are to see the forest through non-human eyes; during another we encounter an expert naturalist who, like an arboreal Hercule Poirot deduces a wealth of information from a wolf skull he holds. One walk we can't make because of time constraints is the 17-kilometre day hike to Grey Owl's Cabin. In 1931, the Englishman-cum-naturalist-cum-native lived in Riding Mountain National Park with his two pet beavers and served as a "caretaker of animals."

The first thing you notice about Riding National Park's town of Wasagaming is how much it must resemble Banff of 50 years ago. You half expect a moose to walk up the street any minute. The shops are quaint, there's no neon and the folks are, well, folksy. There's the usual visitors centre and museum, but also the largest log cinema in North America that shows first-run movies. The town (whose name means "clear water" in Cree) sits on a chilly clear lake called -- you guessed it -- Clear Lake.